Men can smell when a woman is turned on, study says

It’s nasal attraction.

Men can smell when a woman is turned on because of the aroma of her sweat — and they like it, according to a new study.

Dudes were asked to rate women’s aromas — swabbed during various states of arousal — from hot to not, in order to determine the sexiest scent, during research conducted by Arnaud Wisman, Ph.D., a psychologist at the University of Kent.

In two nearly identical experiments, researchers first asked 17 straight female students to bicycle for three minutes in order to work up a sweat. Then, the women watched 20 minutes of the 2005 erotic cult film “9 Songs,” followed by the researchers swabbing their sweat for testing.

The women went through the same process a few days later, but, instead of the smut, they watched a documentary about bridge-building.

During a similar experiment, seven women were asked, in addition to watching “9 Songs,” to watch a dance scene from “Magic Mike” starring Channing Tatum as a male stripper, read an excerpt from “Fifty Shades of Grey” and look at 20 sexually explicit photos.

For comparison, these women were later subjected to watching more boring bridge-building, watching an un-sexy video of men and women dancing, reading a story about knitting and looking at 20 pictures of tropical birds.

Wisman then put 91 men — throughout each experiment — to the test, asking which scent they preferred.

The results — published in February by the Archives of Sexual Behavior — found that men were indeed more attracted to the aroused ladies in all three trials.

“This research suggests that these signals released along with corresponding visual and auditory expressions of sexual interest can produce a stronger overall signal that increases sexual motivation,” Wisman writes in his paper, titled “Sexual Chemosignals: Evidence That Men Process Olfactory Signals of Women’s Sexual Arousal.” “Sexual interest may entail more than meets the eye and we hope that the current findings encourage further research to examine the role of sexual olfactory signals in human communication.”

Olfactory means all things smell-related.

Wisman’s latest titillating research was done to expand upon his previous study, which showed how humans can communicate and detect emotions like fear and sadness through scent.

Sexual arousal, according to Wisman, is also an emotional physical state.

Perhaps, Gwyneth Paltrow’s $75 “This Smells Like My Vagina” candle, which was sold out earlier this year, wasn’t so far-fetched after all.